Opinion: The Hopeful, Harrowing Reminders of Bellator 204

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Evolve Media.

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Bellator 204 on Friday was, to some spiriting degree, a breath
of fresh air from the promotion. In a larger context, as
entertaining and purposeful as it was, the card was a reminder of
the difficulties facing virtually all major MMA promotions in this
sport’s current climate and particularly Bellator
MMA itself.

Bellator 204, which went down in Sioux Falls, South Dakota -- not
exactly a prime locale for big-ticket MMA -- was divergent from the
sort of card construction and matchmaking that has been part and
parcel of Bellator President Scott Coker and senior booker Rich
Chou’s oeuvre for nearly a decade. The card was low on star power,
as its most visible, well-known fighter was bantamweight champion
Darrion
Caldwell, who stepped back up to featherweight to clobber
Ultimate Fighting Championship veteran Noad Lahat in
a non-title affair; Caldwell main events have typically averaged
only 400,000-550,000 live viewers in recent history. However,
Caldwell, a former NCAA Division I wrestling champion, is a bona
fide two-division stud; and if you add up the current records of
the four victorious fighters on the main card, you tally up to
35-2.

Naturally, this card’s structure was largely informed by many of
Bellator’s largest drawing cards being tied up in its ongoing
heavyweight grand prix or preparing for its forthcoming
welterweight grand prix, both of which are promotional machinations
much more akin to Coker’s normal philosophy. It dates back to the
Strikeforce
era. Nonetheless, it remains valuable, because all too often, this
era of Bellator has been too unwilling to give center stage to its
developing talents.

Tywan
Claxton, just 2-0 as a pro heading into his bout with Cris
Lencioni, largely got an opening main card gig because of
insane flying knee knockout, one of 2017’s finest, over Jonny
Bonilla-Bowman in November. However, even on a less star-laden,
small-market Bellator card, he would normally be relegated to the
Internet prelims. Ricky
Bandejas’ beautiful thrust-kick knockout of previously unbeaten
and highly touted Irishman James
Gallagher would usually be relegated to a tape-delayed card
from England or Ireland, which even hardcore fans are more willing
to skip on broadcast, having already read spoilers or seen an
animated gif of the fight finish on Twitter. Four-time All-American
wrestler Logan
Storley has looked positively incredible at 170 pounds and like
a no-brainer future Bellator title challenger, affirming it again
by mauling A.J.
Matthews. However, look at how Bellator has buried its other
ex-wrestler blue chippers like Ed Ruth,
Tyrell
Fortune and Joey Davis.
All three have looked great and, yes, Ruth grabbed a spot in
Bellator’s upcoming welterweight tournament, but as recently as
eight weeks ago, all three were marooned on the online prelims,
opening up a fairly ho-hum Bellator 201 card.

What made this card a more positive and interesting development is
that Coker has traditionally struggled to develop and showcase
prospects going back to the aforementioned Strikeforce days. Sure,
Coker helped put Gina Carano,
Cristiane
“Cyborg” Justino, Ronda
Rousey and Miesha Tate
on the map, but he was largely interested in Carano for her
kickboxing background initially and “Cyborg” became a no-brainer as
she eventually needed a serious foil. Rousey and Tate fell into his
lap, as the UFC wasn’t yet running the women’s divisions.

I can already hear you screaming in your head: “What about Daniel
Cormier? What about Luke
Rockhold?” Well, during the Strikeforce heyday, American
Kickboxing Academy trainer Bob Cook was
serving as a low-key matchmaker for Coker’s undercards, and given
the promotion’s San Jose, California, main base, Cook got to fill
Strikeforce cards with AKA prospects and use his influence to move
them into prominent, televised positions. If not for the San Jose
connection and Coker’s relationship with AKA, it’s unlikely Cormier
and Rockhold, both future UFC champions, would’ve ever realized
their potential first in the Strikeforce cage. Remember, this is
the promotion that cut and ran on Yoel Romero
after one single, albeit admittedly awful, showing against Rafael
“Feijao” Cavalcante.

It’s not that Coker and Co. lack an eye for talent, but rather that
the Coker mandate typically operates on different principles. As
he’s always been running second fiddle to the bigger, more powerful
UFC, he has opted to sign notable free agents with established name
value that may or may not already have had their best days in an
effort to compete for ratings and attention. When it comes to a
personal preference, Coker, given his taekwondo and kickboxing
background, is more drawn to snatching up exciting,
standup-oriented fighters. Is it any surprise that under his
Bellator regime one of the few hot prospects the organization has
heavily promoted and pushed is Michael
Page?

This is where things get complicated, as it’s not just Coker’s
preferences and predilections that have somewhat hamstrung his
competitive promotional efforts against the UFC. As we know, the
UFC is the Kleenex or Coke of MMA, so trying to appeal to casual
sports watchers or moderately informed combat sports fans may
always result in audiences seeing any non-UFC product as an
inferior good, which is a fundamental, seemingly intractable uphill
battle. More than that, Bellator has very little history and
success in the pay-per-view market, which is still prizefighting’s
real moneymaking device. When you can conjure up a stacked PPV
card, you have the chance to blend big-draw stars with
up-and-coming talents just on the cusp of greatness, bolstering all
athletes involved. This is not the reality Bellator enjoys.

Instead, MMA interest is as fickle as ever, as witnessed by the
UFC’s wildly fluctuating and mercurial cable and PPV numbers based
on simply who is in the main event; more than ever, people want to
pick and choose how to spend their time and money, especially when
even diehards can easily catch up on whatever they missed in digest
form if they have a Twitter account or know how to use Google.

Apropos of this, it’s not just the UFC’s numbers that are down. As
I write this, the Bellator 204 live viewership numbers have not
been released, but up to Bellator 203, the promotion is drawing
approximately 463,000 live viewers per card through its first 12
events in 2018. In 2017, it was 742,000. In 2016, it was
772,000.

Now, those are just difficulties germane to the entire MMA market,
while Bellator has more specific hills to climb. Bellator signed a
nine-figure deal with international, online streaming service DAZN,
but will this fickle, ever-more-choosy MMA audience -- many already
pay for UFC Fight Pass -- throw down another $9.99 a month for
those cards? By the way, it’s $20 a month in Canada after the
introductory free month. As far as its relationship with the
Paramount Network goes, main cards for Bellator events, sans the
rare PPV card, still only offer four fights, which gives you a
paltry amount of space to expose a casual audience flicking through
cable to some of your best prospects and potential future
champions.

I know you can’t always catch lightning in a bottle and identify
the next Conor
McGregor, snatch him up and transform your second-banana MMA
promotion into a neck-and-neck UFC competitor. At the same time,
part of what has made McGregor one of the most famous athletes on
the planet is the UFC’s platform and media distribution model. Even
if Bellator finds a pleasing balance between using UFC castoffs
with remaining star power and top-notch up-and-comers and even if
the company improves its cable ratings from the current doldrums,
it’s still hard to compete with the fact that the UFC has used its
long, far-ranging tentacles to mobilize media outlets like TMZ
Sports and Barstool Sports to keep its stars constantly in the
consciousness of casual sports audiences. Never mind the fact that
it just signed its next television deal with ESPN, which even in an
era of cord-cutting consumers, will put more UFC faces in a more
visible position with average sports fans than its Fox deal ever
did.

Again, don’t get this twisted; I’ve never promoted a world-class
MMA promotion in my life and I certainly don’t have a panacea for
what ails Bellator or any promotion trying to make its way in the
world. What I do know is that signing free agent Eddie
Alvarez to a fat deal to come back and finally fight career
rival Michael
Chandler for a third time isn’t going to turn the tide for the
company, nor is relying on the Chael Sonnens and Fedor Emelianenkos
of the world in 2018.

Bellator’s success as a company, both internally to Viacom and
externally to fans and media, is not defined by whether or not it
can overtake and dethrone the UFC. Even if the UFC is struggling,
this is not some rote Hollywood movie on cable -- you know, most of
the Paramount Networks’s lineup -- where your enemy’s exposed
weakness is your chance for opportunity. In combat sports, the
wounds inflicted by media and consumer indifference hurt every
party involved, be they friend or foe. You need to outwit and
out-strategize your contemporaries and in the MMA sphere, and it’s
never as simple as just sign hot amateur wrestlers or
just snap up faded MMA legends. It’s an incredibly difficult
alchemy; Bellator 204 showed some promising laboratory results, but
it’s far from an elixir.